Erasures from The Thousand and One Nights by Yasmine Seale

“It may be the definition of a classic that there is always room for a new translation,” writes Yasmine Seale. But it is also the fate of a retranslation that it must respond to previous versions of the same text, and exist in an “infuriated, intimate” relationship with its predecessors. The poems exhibited here are an embodiment of that very relationship—while working on a new rendition of Arabian Nights, Seale acquired an older translation by Edward Lane and began to create a series of erasures out of its pages. —Jein Han

Yasmine Seale. Erasures from The Thousand and One Nights, published in The Poetry Review, vol. 110, no. 1, Spring 2020.